Building Fun

Following on from the Gallery Hack Camp at The Public back in February, I’ve been working with fellow attendees Rachel Sutton, Dave Checkley, Kim Wall and Garry Bulmer on a commission to build a Mobile Fun Factory to inhabit The Public’s atrium space over the summer.

Our brief was mostly centred around this steel frame that’s just a leeeetle bit smaller than the goods lift:


We’ve been tasked with turning it into a Mobile Fun Factory: a structure that can rove around the atrium space of the arts centre and be used to display the products of the summer workshops, as well as being a playful thing in its own right.

brainstorm

First step: a ginormous brainstorm to figure out what a Mobile Fun Factory might be…


cardboard

Second step: breaking out the cardboard and gaffa tape!


We’ve moved on a bit since that first cardboard maquette built in March. For a bunch of people who, for the most part, had barely even met before, it’s turned out to be a formidable team. I’m also in the role of project manager, so it’s my job to keep an eye on these things, and my considered opinion is that these guys have some truly formidable making skills. HIRE THEM!

As we slowly get closer to completion, here are a few images from the build process so far…

sketch

An early sketch. The final Fun Factory won’t be entirely dissimilar to this…


anglegrind

Fettling new plates for the new castors


yellow

Yellow is the colour of Fun


top accumulations

Possibly the sexiest assemblage of soil pipe ever.


bunker

Seekrit bunker


ireye

Testing the camera feed


periscope simulator

Periscope simulator


secret cinema

The Secret Cinema starts to take shape…


We’re pretty much onto the final assemblage of component parts now, so hopefully the Mobile Fun Factory should be mobile and fun soon.

fun button

The street and you(r artwork)

Rue et Vous

I’ve spent the last week or so in Paris hosted by a gang of wonderful creative people.

At some point after talking about Parisian and Tokyo galleries with Orie, I challenged her to take her work and site it out in the city somewhere rather than waiting for a formal exhibition.

The next morning we set out to do just that, asking ourselves a) where needs some art, b) where would we like to put some art and c) where do we feel we can put some art? Yet again, I was struck by how powerfully having a task to accomplish can frame your experience of place and foreground details within your surroundings.

We were fortunate enough to dodge the rain, but strong winds and bitterly cold temperatures made it hard to work with Orie’s tiny radish seed musical notes and her delicate leaf frogs. We still managed to install a few subtle interventions, though…

Frog Fountain

Fountain Notes

Notre Musique

Notre Musique

Notre Grenouille

I was also amused/bemused by how we could set up with glue, scissors and thread on a major throughfare and not have anyone pay any attention to what we were doing. A laissez faire metroplolitan attitude, or just a blind eye to tourists doing odd things?

Notre Musique

Notre Musique

Back in the clay room

kidney lines

I’m enjoying the chance to get hands-on with different materials and really have some options when it comes down to choosing what to make my interfaces out of.

For this project I’ll be casting some forms in wax. Yesterday and today I began the process of making a pattern from which to make the mould for the casting.

You gotta love clay.

support mould

halves

top and bottom

blob

cut and squidge

Weatherproofing homebrew GPS kit (part 3)

With the first GPS Orchestra workshop and the Ikon Youth Programme project coming up, there’s been growing urgency to find a way of protecting my GPS modules from a) people and b) weather.

I’ve been toying with the idea of laser cutting some cases, but have found prices prohibitive, so I had to think laterally…

Job done – I’ve turned a dozen of these battery-to-USB-power gadgets from the pound shop

nah, we'll use it for something else, thanks.

Into a swarm of Cumbria-ready GPS units.

swarm of GPS receivers#

There’s a Flickr set showing the intermediate stages…

GPS different: upcoming workshops

I’m a sucker for multiples, so you can imagine how excited I am as bits of GPS kit come rolling in not just in twos or threes, but in class-sized quantities!

GPS modules, cables and nano microcontrollers. Plus bonus bubblewrap!

I’ve been developing a couple of workshops designed to get people thinking differently about ways to use GPS.

I’m not saying I have all the answers (and it’d be a bit boring if I did!), but I can certainly furnish some basic skills and, in the spirit of hackspaces, getting a bunch of people in the same room at the same time with a load of stuff is bound to catalyse Interesting Things. So let’s have at it and push the possibilities!

First takers are the rather marvellous sounding Octopus Collective based up in Barrow-in-Furness who will be hosting GPS Orchestra. Here the challenge will be to invent and make unique noise-making devices triggered by location in – and movement through – space.

The other workshop currently on offer is Beyond Longitude:

With an emphasis on the experience of people moving through space, Beyond Longitude is an introduction to using the open source Arduino platform to make digital devices that respond to – and make things happen in – the physical world. We’ll work through a series of small projects and instigations asking how to use GPS to do more than just draw a line where we have been.

Both workshops are initially planned as being day-long sessions for about 10 participants. I bring the electronics and enough instruction to seed some possibilities, then we get making and see what happens.

I’m looking for groups and organisations around the country who would like to host one or both of these workshops. If you have a suitable workspace and are interested in investigating interactions with a nearby outdoor space, then get in touch.

Playing Out

This made me smile a lot; not only from a play point of view, but also the place-making.

Playing Out from Playing Out on Vimeo.

http://playingout.net/
FaceBook
Twitter

Forest Road

Sure the Dogpool Lane sign usually has some creative deletions going on, but for some reason one of the signs for Forest Road has been completely white-ed out for a while now.

Just as I was starting to think it needed a bit of green, someone else has beaten me to it:

Forest Road

I like that this has happened and I like the subtle effect it has on how the neighbourhood feels.

What little bits of street hacking would you like to see?

Their enthusiasm is infectious

I’ve been thinking a lot about community-building around organisations and other groups recently. Well, for a long time really – it keeps cropping up in different forms.

This Don’t bring your 3D printer to MakerFaire post from the Hack a Day blog seems to resonate with a few things:

I’ll tell you what you need to bring. Listen close, because this is very important. Think about the people at your hackerspace. You’ve got a person or a few people who are very excited about something. It may not look particularly special to you. It may not be in the headlines of Make Magainze (yet), and you probably haven’t seen it for sale online with a fancy web page. This person/people may seem like the fringe to you. Some oddball that just happens to get really excited at the thought of some peculiar laser or a specific type of leather working . Bring that person. Have them go on and on about their peculiar project. Their enthusiasm is infectious. Your hackerspace will be remembered. Hackerspace’s power lies in the diversity of their people and what they do with the space. Don’t show up thinking about what your hackerspace supplies to your members, but show off what your members have supplied your hackerspace.[original emphasis]

Academia

I’ve spent the last few days surrounded by academics and researchers.
It got me thinking what department I might like to be affiliated to.
After a frustrating search, I started to dream one up…

blackboard drawing

Welcome to the department of HCI HPCI (Human-Place-Computer Interaction).

Human: the two main ingredients are the body and story-telling.

Place: urban, rural, large, small, public, intimate and everything in between.

Computer: unlikely to involve screens.

Interaction: like you’ve never experienced before.

We’d be a very empirical bunch of people – getting out there and learning by doing. Segregation into “teachers” and “students” probably wouldn’t be very useful. Members of the Department of HPCI would be interstitials: mobile, able to occupy the gaps between things and effect change. The department too would be something of an inbetweener: fluctuating co-incidences of interest resulting in temporary bonds to those within more traditional departments of Art, Computing, Urban Studies, Sociology… I’m thinking we’d also need adjunct professors in Sound Engineering, Electronics, Neuroscience, Astrophysics, History and, well, pretty much any other discipline you’d care to mention…

Bookmore would provide the support structures and pertinent questions; Lynne would design the graduation gowns and distribute motivation; Holly would be in charge of bunting (and running for your life); Hannah would instigate magic moments; Paul would invite people in; and Markuz would enable them to participate in something bigger than themselves.

Who else?

Test-driving the possibility probe

I like this moment in a project – where the idea made real is first taken out into the wide world and your visions are (hopefully) shown to be roughly on target and, if you’re really lucky, whole new avenues of exploration are opened to you.

possibility probe

Test-drive a-go-go

This morning Pete and I took the Possibility Probes (I’ve sent off the marketing copy, so these things now have a name – Possibility Probes is part of it) out for a test-drive.

Most targets have been hit:

  • To be contrary to the light, cuddly, empathy-evoking bundles from the initial Colony playtesting (this project is an oxbow in a much larger, meandering research series)
  • To be a little bit uncomfortable and unwieldy, but not too much so.
  • To be audible.
  • To be felt.

The one main area for improvement before the public get their hands on them is to improve the response to landscape.

Not bad for a first iteration, though…

Possibility Probe (first test drive)

Possibility Probe (first test drive)

Possibility Probe (first test drive)

Possibility Probe (first test drive)

Possibility Probe (first test drive)

Possibility Probe (first test drive)

Possibility Probe (first test drive)

Possibility Probe (first test drive)

Possibility Probe (first test drive)

Thanks to Pete for being a willing pioneer and test subject.



Copyright and permissions:

General blog contents released under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license. Artworks and other projects copyright Nicola Pugh 2003-2024, all rights reserved.
If in doubt, ask.
The theme used on this WordPress-powered site started off life as Modern Clix, by Rodrigo Galindez.

RSS Feed.